Mistletoe: Magical Properties & Uses

Mistletoe is a plant that belongs entirely to the threshold: it grows between earth and sky, rooted in neither, killed by neither. Its magical uses are accordingly liminal: it is used in workings that require crossing or holding a boundary, in protection at the threshold of a house, and in workings involving life and death. The Norse tradition of wearing it for protection is one of the oldest documented magical uses of any plant. It is also associated with healing and with the reversal of what seems final. The berries are toxic; the magical use is of dried leaves and stems in sachets and protective bundles, never in any preparation for internal use.

Mistletoe (Viscum album) berries are toxic to humans and most animals and must never be consumed. European mistletoe extract (Iscador) is used in anthroposophic medicine as a complementary cancer treatment, with clinical trials producing mixed but sometimes positive results for quality of life. Its lectins and viscotoxins have been studied for immunomodulatory properties. Culpeper recommended it for epilepsy and convulsions. The plant must only ever be approached as an external magical herb; no preparation for internal use is safe or appropriate.

Baldur, Aeneas, Apollo

The plant the Druids cut with a golden sickle from the sacred oak, in a ceremony Pliny the Elder describes in detail in his Natural History (Book XVI), is the most mythologically charged plant in the Northern European tradition. In Norse mythology it is the material of the arrow that killed the beloved god Baldur; the one plant the goddess Frigg had forgotten to extract a promise of harmlessness from. The golden bough of Aeneas in Virgil's Aeneid is commonly identified as mistletoe: the branch that opens the underworld to the living. The Christmas kissing tradition is a late echo of its very old association with love, peace, and the magic of the threshold between worlds.